Neil Warnock is an Idiot

Many of my non-British readers won’t know who Neil Warnock is, or won’t even be bothered about football (Americans, read: soccer), but please don’t click the X on the browser just yet!

Here’s the background: Liverpool FC in the last two years have gotten very far in the UEFA Champions League competition. Last season we got to the final, (we won it in 2005!) and we are in the semi-finals again this season. This is actually the only silverware we’re competing for at this stage of the season, which means our league games are relatively unimportant in comparison. As a result, the Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez decided to rest several of his key players for Saturday’s game against Fulham, as the semi-final first leg against Chelsea is as close as Tuesday night.

Fulham are battling relegation, which means that the outcome of our game against Fulham is not only important to them, but other teams trying to avoid relegation too. The other teams down there would be hoping Liverpool beat Fulham and “do them a favour”.

None of which is, or should be, a concern to Liverpool. Right? Not according to the bitter cynical irrational rantings of Yorkshireman Neil Warnock. His gripe? Last season, Liverpool also fielded a ‘weakened’ team against Fulham, who actually beat Liverpool and eventually avoided the drop. Warnock’s team, Sheffield United, got relegated.

Here’s what Warnock had to say just before this weekend’s game:

“My advice to Reading, Bolton and the rest would be, if you’re expecting any favours, don’t hold your breath. They will have to do it themselves.”

Yes, and what’s your point?

“The fact of the matter is that if Liverpool were already out of the Champions League and needed to win to get fourth spot, they would play their strongest side.”

Yes, but again, what’s your point? Liverpool are in fact NOT out of the Champions League and don’t need to win to get fourth spot, so they don’t need to play their strongest side. So far, so obvious.

“Instead, I fully expect them to play a weakened team at Fulham.”

As did most people in the country.

“It’s part of a big club’s mentality. They look after themselves and they don’t bother about anyone else.”

Isn’t this part of EVERY sports team’s mentality?? Which sports team doesn’t think about just itself?

If you’re a professional sportsman and you have guilt about the knock-on effect of a game YOU WIN, you’re in the wrong business!

“The whole story that Sheffield United were going down and me having a pop at them afterwards was just treated like fish and chip paper by them. Liverpool didn’t care because they weren’t the ones getting hurt by it all.”

Well, actually Neil, Liverpool probably didn’t care because no one cares about your small-time poxy little opinions.

Of course, what Warnock fails to mention is that if Fulham would have ended up getting relegated, they would have gotten hurt. Maybe Liverpool were thinking about Fulham and didn’t want to hurt them by relegating them??

“Integrity, doing what is right for the game, comes way down Rafa’s list of priorities.”

Notice the false dichotomy: doing what is right for the game (whatever that means!) versus doing what is best for Liverpool.

What Warnock doesn’t realise (because he’s an idiot and because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about) is that doing what is ‘right for the game’ is precisely doing whatever is right for Liverpool! The only thing Liverpool should be concerned about is doing what is best for themselves. What is good for “the game” is open competition where clubs are free to play the players they want against any opposition they want.

What kind of a warped mentality could suggest that a sports team (or any business for that matter) should be interested in the wellbeing of its rivals?!

All that aside, Warnock’s Sheffield United had 38 games to amass enough points to avoid relegation. They didn’t. Boo hoo. That’s football. Warnock also forgets the last game of the season, when his team LOST to Wigan Athletic. A win would have kept them up, but they lost. Boo hoo.

What does Warnock expect: that a more successful club somehow has a responsibility to not act in its best interest in case another club could possibly incur an advantage/disadvantage as a result?? What if all clubs did this? The bigger clubs would go into games actively looking to not win where possible, after all, who wants to “hurt” another club by beating them?! Pathetic.

As always with this kind of sacrificial mentality, it’s the successful clubs that are to be penalised because they are successful; the clubs with the biggest squads should be forced to play their best teams in EVERY game in Warnock’s opinion. Why? Because they have the biggest and best squads. In other words, the better you are, the more you should be penalised and help accountable for taking advantage of your superiority!

But what about Sheffield United and other small clubs? Why doesn’t anyone talk about them pulling their finger out and wining more games?!

Liverpool did go on to lose in the final last year, but imagine if we would have fielded a full strength team against Fulham. Maybe Rafa would have said: “if only I could have rested my key players at Fulham to avoid tiredness/injury etc, perhaps we would have won the final.” People would have laughed at him probably, and Warnock wouldn’t have had anything to say.

But when a team like Warnock’s has 38 games to get enough points and then complain because Liverpool acted in their best interest, he gets his obnoxious face all over the TV and in the papers.

What is wrong with this mentality? In a word: altruism. Basically, the pathetic notion that acting in someone else’s interest OVER your own is somehow virtuous, more moral, nobler, for the “greater good”. Well, that’s nonsense. Ever club must act in its own self-interest, regardless of the effects on other clubs: play whatever team you want; play however you want. At the end of the day, you will stand or fall based on how successful YOU are – not how other clubs are!

The only people who don’t want to play by this fair and healthily competitive rule are the ones who are afraid; the ones who have something to lose by a fair fight; the ones who seek the unearned; the ones who can’t actually achieve success themselves but beg others to do the work for them; the ones who aren’t actually good enough to stand on their own merit. In other words, people like Neil Warnock.

Salary capping is Evil

I was reading a sport-related article on MSN before, and there was a vote asking readers whether they thought footballer’s salaries should be capped. Over 70% of people had voted yes. I wondered why. Before I venture a guess, let’s answer the question of “should footballer’s wages be capped?”, by extending it to the overriding theme: “should anyone’s wages be capped?”

The question comes down to this: should anyone decide how much money you deserve to earn? If you are employed you’ve reached an acceptable wage that you are prepared to work for and your employer is prepared to pay. To “deserve” a wage is to reach an agreeable figure that your boss is prepared to pay you – that is all that “deserve” can mean, and it is no one else’s business. Now some businesses, such as the entertainment industry, are so huge that the demand for top-quality entertainers forces up the price for the services of such individuals. Demand must be met with supply. Sport is massive business and generates huge amounts of wealth – why shouldn’t the key architects of this business that creates vast profit for millions of people – the players, be remunerated accordingly?

It is the success of private companies that allows them to reward their employees with greater pay. It is the moral right of bigger and better companies, such as more successful football clubs, to attract better players to their team and reward them accordingly. Money talks, and it allows companies to fight fairly over a wanted player. If one club can afford to pay more than another, tough – that is the beauty of money: it allows an objective worth to be placed on items of value. Has the bigger club earned the right to sign a player? Yes! By sheer nature of the fact that they can.

Who has the right to dictate to a private business how it uses its money? There are only two institutions that have the power to do so: any club or association that a company has voluntarily subscribed to, and government. Only the first of these institutions has the right to do so – this is because a company that is voluntarily a member of a business association agrees to abide by the decision of that association. The government however has no right to tell an individual (and by extension a private company) how to manage its own property. The only proper moral role of government is to protect the Rights of its citizens. How much any company chooses to pay any employee is a private matter, and no business of anyone else’s. If the wages of any person were to be capped by an act of government, this would be a gross violation of rights, and monstrously evil.

What about those who have more important jobs in society, like doctors, teachers, fire-fighters etc? What about them? Do I think it’s “right” that someone who kicks a ball around a pitch gets paid the same wage in a week as a doctor might get in a year? In a word, yes. Consider this: by what objective criteria can you decide how much someone deserves to get paid? And how would you enforce such a criteria, without violating individual rights? If you decide that being a doctor is morally worthy of more money than being a footballer, how do you go about reimbursing the doctor according to your standard? You cannot create money out of thin air – all you can do is artificially inflate the price of healthcare at the cost of the consumer so that the doctor gets the money he is worth, in your opinion. But where does this money come from? Or do you take the “surplus” money that footballer’s earn and give it to the doctor? In other words, do you redistribute wealth according to some egalitarian philosophy of equality or perceived “social merit”? In further words, do you ask the footballer to earn the doctor’s money for him; do you ask the doctor to live off the effort of the footballer? No? Madness? Unfair? Evil? Such is the nature and mentality of socialism.

I think I now know why many people think wages should be capped. I think it’s a result of a socialistic mentality (especially common in the UK): those on “too much” money somehow owe their excess to others. Those on “too little” money are owed more from others. What the socialistic mindset really breeds is this kind of thinking: “your extra money should be mine!” And of course, someone lower down the pay scale is thinking the same of you. Do these people think money grows on trees? The reason some professions pay so much and others pay so little is this: demand. Demand is met with production, and production is the source of all wealth. If, some day, sport massively declined in popularity, so would wages. If people feel there is something immoral about how much sportsmen are paid, there is only one solution: use your individual power as consumer to not finance that industry. How many people who complain about huge wages will give up their Sky TV, their season tickets, their replica shirts?? Not many. They want world class footballers but without the wages that go with them. They want hundred-thousand capacity stadiums, but without the industry that will pay for them. They want some of ‘their’ money back from the superstars who earn it, yet keep paying over money every week. How will their wishes be met?? Somehow. In other words: at someone else’s expense.

If we are going to complain about mediocrities being paid inflated sums of money, let’s start with politicians. Only politicians can vote themselves payrises that aren’t connected to any production or merit. If the government decides that you should pay an extra 10% of your wages to them, because they say so, that is all that’s required to make it law. And unlike sport, you have no choice in the matter. But that’s a subject for another article.

If the mentality of capitalism was more abundant, people would admire those more successful, not be envious. People would respect production. People would understand that wealth is not a finite resource to be scavenged and shared by a non-objective mob vote based on immoral notions of “merit” – they would appreciate that wealth can be created, and demand is met with supply, and the only thing anyone can claim to deserve is what they’ve earned by the mutual agreement of other people. That is why nobody has the right to tell any two people how much they may pay each other. Anyone who claims otherwise is immoral and invoking an evil philosophy.